The Birth of Tragedy - Altervista

1 The Birth of TragedyFriedrich NietzscheTable of ContentsThe Birth of to Richard Birth of TragedyiThe Birth of TragedyFriedrich NietzscheThis page copyright 2003 Blackmask 3 4 5 6 7 Preface to Richard Wagner 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 19 20 21 This translation,which has been prepared by Ian C. Johnston of Malaspina University College,Nanaimo, BC, Canada is in the public domain and may be used by anyone, in wholeor in part, without charge and without permission, for any purpose, provided thesource is acknowledged, released December 2000. Last revised June translator has added occasional editorial inserts to help clarify some foreign terms. And Nietzsche's longparagraphs have been broken into shorter questions, suggestions, corrections, and so on please contact Ian JohnstonFriedrich NietzscheThe Birth of TragedyAn Attempt at Self CriticismThe Birth of Tragedy1[Note that this first section of the Birth of Tragedy was added to the book many years after it first appeared, asthe text makes clear.]

2 Nietzsche wrote this Attempt at Self Criticism in 1886. The original text, written in1870 71, begins with the Preface to Richard Wagner, the second major section]Whatever might have been be the basis for this dubious book , it must have been a question of the utmostimportance and charm, as well as a deeply personal one. Testimony to that effect is the time in which it arose(in spite of which it arose), that disturbing era of the Franco Prussian war of 1870 71. While the thunderclapof the Battle of Worth was reverberating across Europe, the meditative lover of enigmas whose lot it was tofather this book sat somewhere in a corner of the Alps, extremely reflective and perplexed (thussimultaneously very distressed and carefree) and wrote down his thoughts concerning the Greeks, the kernelof that odd and difficult book to which this later preface (or postscript) should be dedicated. A few weeksafter that, he found himself under the walls of Metz, still not yet free of the question mark which he had setdown beside the alleged serenity of the Greeks and of Greek culture, until, in that month of the deepesttension, as peace was being negotiated in Versailles, he finally came to peace with himself and, while slowlyrecovering from an illness he'd brought back home with him from the field, finished composing the Birth ofTragedy out of the Spirit of Music.

3 From music? Music and Tragedy ? The Greeks and the Music of Tragedy ? The Greeks and the art work ofpessimism? The most successful, most beautiful, most envied people, those with the most encouraging styleof life the Greeks? How can this be? Did they really need Tragedy ? Even more to the point, did they reallyneed art? And Greek art, what is that, and how did it come about?One can guess from all this just where the great question mark about the worth of existence was placed. Ispessimism necessarily the sign of collapse, destruction, and disaster, of the exhausted and enfeebled instinct,as it was among the Indians, as it is now, to all appearances, among us modern peoples and Europeans? Isthere a pessimism of the strong? An intellectual inclination for what in existence is hard, dreadful, angry, andproblematic, emerging from what is healthy, from overflowing well being, from living existence to the full? Isthere perhaps a way of suffering from the very fullness of life, a tempting courage of the keenest sight whichdemands what is terrible, like an enemy a worthy enemy against which it can test its power, from which itwill learn what to fear means?

4 What does the tragic myth mean precisely for the Greeks of the best, strongest, and bravest age? What aboutthat tremendous phenomenon of the Dionysian? And what about what was born out of the Dionysian thetragedy? By contrast, what are we to make of what killed Tragedy Socratic morality, dialectic, thesatisfaction and serenity of the theoretical man? Could not this very Socratic way be a sign of collapse,exhaustion, sickness, and the dissolution of the anarchic instinct? And could the Greek serenity of laterGreek periods be only a red sunset? Could the Epicurean will hostile to pessimism be merely the prudence ofa suffering man? And even scientific enquiry itself, our science indeed, what does all scientific enquiry ingeneral mean considered as a symptom of life? What is the point of all that science and, even more serious,where did it come from? What about that? Is scientific scholarship perhaps only a fear and an excuse in theface of pessimism, a delicate self defence against the Truth?

5 And speaking morally, something likecowardice and falsehood? Speaking unmorally, a clever trick? Oh, Socrates, Socrates, was that perhaps yoursecret? Oh you secretive ironist, was that perhaps your irony?2 What I managed to seize upon at that time, something fearful and dangerous, was a problem with horns (notnecessarily a bull exactly, but in any event a new problem). Today I would state that it was the problem ofscholarship itself, scholarly research for the first time grasped as problematic, as dubious. But that book , inwhich my youthful courage and suspicion then spoke, what an impossible book had to grow out of a task socontrary to the spirit of youth!The Birth of Tragedy22 Created out of merely premature and really immature personal experiences, which lay close to the threshold ofsomething communicable, and built on the basis of art (for the problem of scientific research cannot beunderstood on the basis of scientific enquiry) a book perhaps for artists with analytical tendencies and acapacity for retrospection (that means for exceptions, a type of artist whom it is necessary to seek out andwhom one never wants to look for)

6 , full of psychological innovations and artists' secrets, with an artist'smetaphysics in the background, a youthful work full of the spirit of youth and the melancholy of youth,independent, defiantly self sufficient as well, even where it seemed to bow down with special reverence to anauthority in short, a first work also in the bad sense of the word, afflicted, in spite of the antiquity of theproblem, with every fault of youth, above all with its excessive verbiage and its storm and the other hand, looking back on the success the book had (especially with the great artist to whom itaddressed itself, as if in a conversation, that is, with Richard Wagner), the book proved itself I mean it wasthe sort of book which at any rate was effective enough among the best people of its time. For that reasonthe book should at this point be handled with some consideration and discretion. However, I will not totallyhide how unpleasant the book seems to me now, how strangely after sixteen years it stands there in front ofme, an older man, a hundred times more discriminating, but with eyes which have not grown colder in theslightest.

7 The issue which that bold book dared to approach for the first time has itself become no moreremote: to look at scientific enquiry from the perspective of the artist, but to look at art from the perspective oflife..3 Let me say again: today for me it is an impossible book . I call it something poorly written, ponderous, painful,with fantastic and confused imagery, here and there so saccharine it is effeminate, uneven in tempo, withoutany impulse for logical clarity, extremely self confident and thus dispensing with evidence, even distrustfulof the relevance of evidence, like a book for the initiated, like Music" for those baptized in music, those whoare bound together from the start in secret and esoteric aesthetic experiences, a secret sign recognized amongartistic blood relations, an arrogant and rhapsodic book , which right from the start hermetically sealed itselfoff from the profane vulgarity of the intelligentsia even more than from the people, but a book which, asits effect proved and continues to prove.

8 Must also understand enough of this issue to search out its fellowrhapsodists and tempt them to new secret paths and dancing any rate here a strange voice spoke (curious people understood that, as did those who found it distasteful),the disciple of an as yet unknown God, who momentarily hid himself under the hood of a learned man, underthe gravity and dialectical solemnity of the German man, even under the bad manners of the followers ofWagner. Here was a spirit with alien, even nameless, needs, a memory crammed with questions, experiences,secret places, beside which the name Dionysus was written like a question mark. Here spoke (so people toldthemselves suspiciously) something like a mystic and an almost maenad like soul, which stammered withdifficulty and arbitrarily, as if talking a foreign language, almost uncertain whether it wanted to communicatesomething or remain silent. This new soul should have sung, not spoken! What a shame that I did not dareto utter as a poet what I had to say at that time.

9 Perhaps I might have been able to do that! Or at least as aphilologist even today in this area almost everything is still there for philologists to discover and dig up,above all the issue that there is a problem right here and that the Greeks will continue remain, as before,entirely unknown and unknowable as long as we have no answer to the question, What is the Dionysian? 4 Indeed, what is the Dionysian? This book offers an answer to that question: a knowledgeable person speaksthere, the initiate and disciple of his own god. Perhaps I would now speak with more care and less eloquentlyabout such a difficult psychological question as the origin of Tragedy among the Greeks. A basic issue is theThe Birth of Tragedy33relationship of the Greeks to pain, the degree of their sensitivity. Did this relationship remain constant? Or didit turn itself around? That question whether their constantly strong desire for beauty, feasts, festivities, andnew cults arose out of some lack, deprivation, melancholy, or pain.

10 If we assume that this desire for thebeautiful and the good might be quite true and Pericles, or, rather, Thucydides, in the great Funeral Orationgives us to understand that it is where must that contradictory desire stem from, which appears earlier thanthe desire for beauty, namely, the desire for the ugly or the good strong willing of the ancient Hellenes forpessimism, for tragic myth, for pictures of everything fearful, angry, enigmatic, destructive, and fateful as thebasis of existence? Where must Tragedy come from? Perhaps out of desire, out of power, out of overflowinghealth, out of overwhelming fullness of life?And psychologically speaking, what then is the meaning of that madness out of which tragic as well as comicart grew, the Dionysian madness? What? Is madness perhaps not necessarily the symptom of degradation,collapse, cultural decadence? Is there perhaps (a question for doctors who treat madness) a neurosis associatedwith health, with the youth of a people, and with youthfulness?